We know it as the House of Commons, but is it a home? I'll just leave you with that thought for a moment or two ...

During his Dispatches: Lost In Care, Rageh Omaar made a strong case for the quite exceptional crapness of the lives of those kids raised by social services rather than families. The statistics told you everything you really didn't want to know, but needed to: one in five girls over the age of 16 has a baby within a year of leaving "care" (my quotes, obviously; "care" is such a misnomer). Nearly one quarter of the prison population and one in three homeless people have also been in "care" ... that would be what you'd call an indictment.

But if the intention was to deliver a horror show charting the misery of young lives shaped by years of institutionalised abuse and neglect, it was undermined by the casting of several telegenic young "care" graduates as interviewees, all of whom were (on the surface, obviously - we were context-free) such articulate, heads-screwed-on sort of kids the film occasionally recalled an episode of Tracy Beaker. For example, 19-year-old Aradia was so pretty and smart one was almost distracted from the fact that she had been in "care" ("It's not as if that many people actually do care ... ") from the age of four and had been moved an almost unbelievable 46 times, including once, in the absence of an alternative, into a tent.

The "care" system isn't working (not merely my observation, but that of Natasha Finlayson, chief executive of The Who Cares? Trust), and so it is hard, even with the best will in the world - never mind all the ordinarily flawed wills - to see how it ever can. "Social pedagogy" is, however, the new buzz phrase - a more hands-on, holistic approach to the business of looking after damaged young people, imported from more socially enlightened parts of the EU, and involving the occasional hug.

Call it what you like, but this sounds like common sense to me. And here it was in action, in an Essex children's "home" (my quotes again), run by a married couple, Dave and Susan, where the kids performed their "care home-grown" version of the Undertones' "Teenage Kicks". Undeniably cute, but there's clearly a long way to go. Of 4,300 children under one year old in "care", apparently only 120 will be adopted as babies, while the majority (if they are adopted at all), will be roughly three years old, which in a great many cases may be at least 18 months too late to effectively rewire the faulty connections (my analogy). As a non-expert but merely a mum with a hunch, I'd say it's probably closer to two years and 11 months too late, but what do I know?

Well, maybe just a bit more than some of the prospective adopters in Find Me A Family, an unashamedly heartstring-tugging three-parter in which a trio of would-be parents subjected themselves to quasi-reality TV formatting in order to find their perfect child while learning that their "perfect" child was likely to be anything but.

The series was presented by David Akinsanya, not only an engaging broadcaster and "adoption campaigner" but, having also been raised in "care", the best - only? - person capable of fronting a show which needed to tick a daunting amount of boxes in the categories of informing-and-entertaining-in-a-public-service-broadcasting kinda way, and who made it unmissable despite the terrible suspenseful talent show-style pauses as the adopters waited to find out if their applications had been successful, when I half-expected Simon Cowell to pop up: "It's a definite 'Yes' from me, Rachel. You've got three 'Yeses' - you're going through!"

But the nail-biting formatting was a nonsense, because all the prospective adopters - married couple Richard and Cathy (plus eight-year-old daughter, Rachel), gay couple John and Anthony and 35-year-old singleton Rachel - were going to get the thumbs-up or we wouldn't have had our hour of telly, though it was not without hiccups. When, for example, David Akinsanya arranged for Rachel to "borrow" a seven-year-old lad for a weekend, young Cyrus turned up with his goldfish... and the following morning the goldfish turned belly-up, which (as a mother-of-small-sons and a keeper-of-goldfish) I know I shouldn't have found quite as amusing as I did - poor Cyrus, poor Rachel, poor, er, fish. Alternatively, instead of being lent somebody else's child, Rachel could simply have been given a short and entirely unscientific list which would tell her almost everything she'd need to know about the day-to-day behavioural patterns of the seven-year-old male. Thus, boys will: • Shout• Cry a bit • Run a lot• Shout some more• Kick balls/stones/cans/siblings/parents/anything kickable, basically• Wave "sticks" around (games consoles/light sabres/water pistols/gun-shaped sticks/actual stick-shaped sticks)• Say "No" a lot• Say "sorry!..."• Hug, endlessly (boys are way huggier than girls)• Ask for stuff he can't have, encompassing the entire chocolate buttons-to-Nintendo Wii spectrum• Search for videos of stick people falling downstairs on YouTube....

Anyway, Rachel got a little boy of her own, Richard and Cathy a little girl, and one hopes that multiple horse-owners John and Anthony find a foal of their own before too long... and I think the delay in the adoption process was more likely to be due to the horses than the couple's sexuality, given they did such a brilliant job of looking after a little girl with special needs for a weekend.

So, heart duly warmed, it was time for Cutting Edge's admirably unsentimental The Homecoming, in which a journalist, Rachel Roberts (there was a glut of Rachels last week), tracked down the kids with whom she and her sister spent 15 months in a Doncaster children's home in the mid-1970s. While, narratively speaking, the moment when Rachel found that the pub situated next door to the building which had been the children's home was now run by an unknown half-brother delivered the biggest emotional punch to the solar plexus, at the heart of the story were Tina and Dennis, who ran the place with such an abundance of love that one of their charges described their own positive experience of being looked after in care, in a children's home (and I have deliberately removed my quotes around both "care" and "home") as "an English version of The Waltons... brilliant!"

During the reunion organised by Rachel, one could see that Tina and Dennis had done a fantastic job; "their" kids had grown up into a spectacularly ordinary cross-section of people in early middle age, which was probably the most extraordinary and touching thing about the film. So, it's clearly entirely possible to be raised in a "home", in "care" and not to be lost, but to feel both cared for and as though those four walls are more than merely a house, are indeed a Home.

Which brings me neatly - too neatly? - to my original point: the House of Commons, a "house" but not exactly a home, is it? No, it's currently more like a giant branch of Homebase, really, wherein the employees get a nice staff discount on whatever they need to effect all-important improvements on their, er, moats ...

Nicely timed to coincide with the House of Commons's internal market meltdown, BBC2's four-night Property Watch trod the ever-tricky line between providing some info (we're all doomed!) amid the 'tainment.

"It was almost like a shopping addiction!" admitted Amanda, whose buy-to-let mortgage debts, from a starting salary of £22,000, total £7.5m - so, I'd be fascinated to know what Amanda's idea of a proper "shopping addiction" looks like. And though it was journalistically pretty level-headed (even with presenter Kate Silverton looking as though she'd explode with joy throughout, but after a career slough she's currently busier than all of Foxtons' busiest branches combined, so I guess that's why), I think Property Watch enjoyed itself slightly more than was entirely seemly - and conspicuously lacked a helpline number after the credits with which diehard property addicts could be assisted to quit their filthy habit.

What hope then for a nation still hooked on property, and whose elected representatives are clearly confused by the difference between a House and a "home"? Not that that's ever going to be a problem for those in "care".

Damages control

An email from a friend wondered what I had made of last week's convoluted final episode of this series of Damages (BBC1). I hadn't watched it so I didn't reply, but I'm up to speed now and (d'oh!) it's obvious, Michael (that's my friend): before Ellen bribed the judge and got Patty (played by Glenn Close) to confess that, yes, she had tried to have Ellen killed, Ellen blew the brains out of the surveillance camera put in the hotel room by the Feds. And then Patty was stabbed in the lift by that slimy Garrity ...

... and William Hurt looked as though he'd got away with murdering Kathleen Turner's husband, until the district attorney, Ted Danson, started sniffing around ... and though we believed Glenn Close was finally dead - omigod! - she was really alive after all!